


we don’t see eye-to-eye (call this a trust fall)

by mouseymightymarvellous



Series: run baby run [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: BAMF Darcy Lewis, Backstory, Gen, Girls with Guns, Implausible Accuracy is Implausible, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Thor: The Dark World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 13:37:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7847167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy's relationship with guns; a ficlette in three parts.<br/>i. In which James and Darcy have a disagreement concerning self-defence.<br/>ii. In which we explore Darcy's past as it relates to the preceding disagreement.<br/>iii. In which James finally emerges triumphant over the disagreement (and over not much else), but will later wish he hadn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we don’t see eye-to-eye (call this a trust fall)

**Author's Note:**

> This is cross-posted to [my tumblr](http://mouseymightymarvellous.tumblr.com/post/146100598149/we-dont-see-eye-to-eye-call-this-a-trust-fall).

**i.**

They are in Lithuania - where Darcy’s faded Russian mostly gets her by and James is fluent and fluid and more at ease than she’s ever seen him - when he gives her the gun.

“Here,” he grunts and thumps the weapon down on the crappy kitchen counter in the shitty pay-by-the-week apartment they’re renting. The sleek lines and matte finish look otherworldly against the scored and cracking formica.

Darcy looks at the gun, then at his face, then at the wooden spoon she has in hand. “Um…” She wasn’t expecting to be gifted implements of death and destruction in the middle of failing at replicating Kamilè Petronis from-down-the-hall’s zrazai, despite the aid of a recipe and very enthusiastic instructions. “What?”

He sighs an exasperated little sound at her obtuseness. “For you. Watch.” He flicks his gaze to hers to make sure she’s following his hands, then picks up the gun again and runs slowly through disassembling it. His hands are graceful as they disengage the magazine, check the slide for a chambered round, then remove the slide and break it down into component parts. When he’s done, he runs through the process backwards, reassembling. The entire procedure is a dance of geometry and coiled violence.

Darcy is frowning when he holds the gun out to her, and James rolls his eyes.

“It’s a Sig P229 nine-millimeter. It’s small enough for your dainty hands and it’s easy to conceal.” She doesn’t move to take it from his outstretched hand. “C’mon. It’s not going to bite. The safety is on.“

“I don’t like guns,” Darcy says stiffly.

James raises a disdainful eyebrow. “Tough fucking luck, you’re learning to shoot a gun. I can’t teach you enough hand-to-hand in a matter of weeks for you to be able to really defend yourself, and a gun has the benefit of being long range. All you have to be able to do is hit centre of mass before anyone gets close and not shoot yourself in the process.”

“I _don’t_ like guns,” Darcy repeats.

James glares at her. “I don’t care. You’re learning to use one.”

Darcy glares back. The imminent fight is put off when the mushrooms and onions in the skillet start to burn terribly, and Darcy ducks away from the heavy tension, swearing viciously, to tend to her neglected attempt at dinner.

This is, she knows, not the end of this discussion. But she doesn’t care how insistent James gets, this isn’t an argument she’s planning on losing.

Darcy _really_ doesn’t like guns.

**ii.**

When Darcy is eleven, her mom rolls back into town with another new boyfriend in tow. Baba narrows her eyes at her wayward daughter’s sunken cheeks and skeletal arms, the faint tremor in her hands and the brittle smile, but lets them in.

Katarina doesn’t have much use for her daughter, but Todd - the new boyfriend - is loud and jocular and willing to put up with Darcy now and again.

One day, Todd lets Darcy tag along behind him to the gun range, chortling to himself about “little girls with guns”. Darcy doesn’t care much for the condescension on his face, but she doesn’t want to be trapped in the house while Baba and Katarina scream at each other, and it’s too cold for her to escape to the park for long.

The men at the range are mostly amused by her as she lingers in Todd’s shadow, wary of them all, but curious, too. She gets pulled in by the war stories a group of old men are trading as they break down and clean their guns, crouching by the table to listen.

“You’re Vera Lewis’ granddaughter?” asks one of the men.

When she nods, they smile at her - kind and only a little bit patronizing - and slowly draw her out with questions about school and what she’s learning in history. She grows more confident the longer they are willing to listen to her ramble about class and her disastrous attempt at creating a Civil War diorama using her My Little Ponies and plastic army men.

Somehow, her recitation of school and their interested responses turns into a large-scale debate on the accuracy of the current history curriculum, labour class struggles, the anti-war movement of the sixties and the second amendment. Darcy is fascinated as these old greybeards with their weary eyes and calloused hands shout over each other and argue about issues she’s never heard even of. Todd has to threaten to leave her to walk home on her own in order to get her to follow him out.

Todd blows out of town shortly thereafter, as Katarina’s beaus usually do: loudly and with too much throwing of objects and slamming of doors.

Darcy keeps going back to the range to do her homework and listen as Mr Ellison and Mr Bradley and the rest trade tales and tell jokes and talk about current events. Darcy slowly falls in love with the slow, methodical movements the old men use to care for the pistols and rifles; more gentleness than she’s used to seeing in the hands of men. They are kind to her, help her when she gets stuck on a math problem, and they never, ever yell at her.

Finally, it is Mr Ellison who runs out of patience and sits her down to run through gun safety and maintenance. “If you’re going to be here all the time, girly, you might as well learn something useful,” he tells her gruffly.

Darcy learns how to hold her body, how to breath, how to brace against the kick. Darcy learns stillness and control. Darcy learns the satisfaction of improvement and the glow of praise from men who have stayed long enough in her life to mean something.

She gets good. Good enough to silence the leers when her boobs appear suddenly at age thirteen, at least while there’s still a gun in her hands. Good enough to silence a world that sneers at her for her worn clothes and the Russian that bounces through her home and the uterus between her legs, at least for those crystalline moments where it is just her and the gun in her hand and the target in her sight and her breath in her ears. 

When Darcy is holding a gun, she is still and in control and untouchable.

And then one day she isn’t the one holding the gun; she is screaming and terrified and covered in blood.

Katarina is no where to be found, and Baba is in the ground with a mess of bullets in her torso, the legacy of a stupid kid desperate for cash and willing to wave a gun around in the convenience store like he knew what he was doing.

Guns had always meant arguments about politics and history lessons and war stories and gruff kindness and control to Darcy. She’d forgotten Mr Ellison’s first lesson, when he had sat her down with a small pistol and a cleaning cloth and oil and looked her right in the eye and said: “This is never, ever a toy. This is a weapon. Respect it, and never point it at anything you aren’t willing to shoot.”

Her first set of foster parents don’t let her find a gun range to frequent. Nor do the second set. The third set have a son who likes to shoot at the crows in the back yard with a BB gun, freezing the air in her lungs and sending her into spiralling panic attacks. She doesn’t even bother asking the fourth set, not when her hands tremble to remember the feel of sharp lines pressing into her palm and the smell of gunpowder.

When she heads to university, her three years in the foster system lingering in her guarded smiles, she buys a taser and doesn’t look back. (Her trigger finger is no longer calloused, but she remembers in her bones and in her blood how to move with recoil, how to absorb it and keep on shooting. It’s a lesson that serves her well when an alien prince falls out of the sky and her boss hits him with their van.)

**iii.**

The sudden silence is shocking and terrible. Darcy dares to peek around the corner of the building, afraid of what she will find.

James is slumped on the ground: a puppet with its strings cut. She can’t see any injuries with the quick glance she allows herself - which can’t also be said for the armour-clad goons who are now splayed out in the alley - but he doesn’t seem to be getting back up.

Fuck, she thinks. Whatever German - she thinks it was German - the head goon shouted through the megaphone must have been some sort of knock-out trigger. She’s surprised they didn’t lead with that instead of the more polite opening salvo of “It’s time to come in from the cold, Soldier” they had delivered with cautiously raised semi-automatics. Their caution hadn’t been enough.

James had caught their tail a half hour ago. He’d sent her away in the crowded marketplace so he could deal with the Hydra strike team on his own, but Darcy wasn’t having any of that, and has been following them from a distance. She didn’t think that he was stupid enough to let them herd him into an ambush, even if he did think he was capable of handling whatever they could throw at him.

Evidently, James wasn’t expecting the trigger phrase.

She hadn’t been expecting the trigger phrase either, but she, at least, wasn’t willing to let her partner walk into danger without at least the modicum of backup that she could provide. Her biggest fear had been getting spotted and used as a hostage, not this shitshow he’s landed them in.

The head goon is shouting orders to the remains of his team, calling for them to tie James up and load him into the back of the van waiting on the curb. Apparently, they aren’t too worried about the stray bullet holes in the side attracting attention.

James, it seems, isn’t going to snap out of whatever fugue he’s in in time to save himself.

Well, Darcy thinks to herself as she shoves her panic down and away, she’s always wanted to be a hero. (Lie. She’s never wanted to be a hero, but she seems to keep falling in with careless idiots who think themselves invincible.)

Darcy considers her options, but time is short, and the list shorter. Her pulse thunders in her ears, threatening to drown out the stomp of boots and curt Russian. She allows herself to breathe, five deep breaths from her diaphragm, pulling in calm and steely resolve and pushing out stress and fear.

When she reaches for the unwanted gun James strapped to an underarm holster despite her vocal protests, her hands do not shake.

The click of the safety disengaging is impossibly loud.

Fifteen rounds, she reminds herself. Fifteen rounds and seven goons. Fifteen rounds and her friend about to be dragged back to hell. Fifteen rounds and she hasn’t shot a gun in a decade.

She peeks around the corner again, marking the seven goons and James’ positions.

She closes her eyes and presses her back to the building she’s been hiding behind. Five more deep breaths.

When she opens her eyes again and swings the gun up, stepping out from around the corner, everything sharpens and colours brighten, bringing the yellow graffiti on the wall and the green weeds in the sidewalk cracks into bright relief.

The closest goon’s forehead blooms bright red as he’s looking up in response to her movement.

Her shoulder aches with the recoil, but her aim doesn’t falter.

Later, as she’s struggling to drag James to a nearby car and to spark the engine to start, she can’t quite remember how she managed to down all seven goons with only fifteen bullets, but she does remember their faces and their surprise and the colour of their blood on the pavement.

It’s only when they’ve been driving in circles for an hour that the terrifying calm she’s been enveloped in suddenly drops away. She barely manages to stop the car and open the door before she’s heaving onto the side of the road. When she finishes, her hands shake.

James is squished awkwardly in the back, still unconscious. The guns and assorted weapons she stripped from the bodies gleam in the duffle bag on the seat next to her.

Darcy closes her door and drives on, waiting for James to wake.


End file.
